Search This Blog

Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Hand-Drawn, CGI, or Live-Action?

Computer animation has a complicated history. When it was first introduced around the mid-90s, it was amazing and innovative. Then, as it slowly started to take over our favorite princess movies and shows, it felt more like an invasion of art. Michael Eisner did not with this when he claimed that traditional animation was no longer relevant in the early 2000s. Today, the medium has advanced so much that it blends seamlessly with live-action movies, blurring the lines between animated and live-action features. Most modern sci-fi movies lie somewhere in the middle. Which medium do we prefer for our princesses? It's undeniable that traditional animation came first, starting with Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. Today, it's rare to see an animated feature that's not made by a computer. Disney is taking advantage of this technology to transform all of their animated princesses into flesh and blood actresses with mixed results.

Pictured above are three incarnations of Belle, one of Disney's most famous princesses.While it's pretty obvious here that the original hand-drawn version is the most beautiful, I am in no way trying to argue that traditional animation is the only form a princess should take. It is my personal favorite because that's what I grew up with, but I can see the benefits of other mediums. In this particular example, I think the problem is that each version of Belle is clearly a downgrade from the one before. The original 1991 classic was nominated for a "Best Picture" Oscar and had tons of love, attention, and money poured into its production. It is a visual feast and even makes use of early CGI for the classic ballroom sequence without tarnishing the hand-drawn art in any way. In comparison, the CGI version of Belle from Sofia the First was done on a TV budget in a simplified style to match that of the show. It works well for Sofia because she's a little girl, but the other princesses never look quite as lovely as they did when we first saw them. Then, there's Emma Watson, who basically ruined the character by refusing to wear clothing, makeup, or hairstyles that were traditional of the time period. Couldn't they at least find someone who could sing?

Of course, all art is subjective. There's no one "true" way to create a princess. The way I see it is that the first art style used for any given princess will always be the best. Every attempt to convert them comes off looking like a cheap imitation. CGI works well if it's done on a large budget with special care given to the designs. I think Tangled benefited greatly from its medium, allowing Rapunzel's hair and satin dress to shimmer in the sunlight and look heavy when wet. It also helps that the legendary Glen Keane animated her by hand as a template for what he wanted the artists to recreate on the computer. The simplified style used for her in the TV series doesn't look as nice as the movie even though it's a lot closer-looking to traditional animation. It's made on a smaller budget with simplified designs. As a curly-haired woman, I'm grateful that CGI allows princesses to have realistic-looking curls that could have never been produced with hand-drawn animation. Merida and Moana probably would not exist the way we know them without technological advances in computer animation.

Live-action princesses also have their advantages. Their costumes have the potential for far more detail than any animator would have time to draw or texture into a computer. They also convey a sense of realism, which is why they are perfect candidates for movies about traveling to a fantasy realm from the real world. Giselle becomes more real both literally and figuratively in Enchanted, and while I personally prefer her animated form, her live-action counterpart does have some lovely costumes that would have been difficult to recreate in animation. Live-action movies have the benefit of selling more tickets to people who are familiar with the actors, something that My Little Pony: The Movie tried to do with animation and failed. The only live-action princess movies that don't work as well are the ones that are converted from animated classics because they are trying to recreate a type of nostalgia that is not reproducible.

I see no reason that these three mediums cannot coexist together so long as they do not try to replace each other. Traditional animation is great for making moving art that looks and feels like another world, CGI is great for adding subtle details that feel realistic without being too real, and live-action is great for costumes and actresses the audience can recognize and relate to. However, the first version of any story will always be the most inspired and the most original. Trying to change it too much takes away from the artist's vision, which is why I was never crazy about Frozen.

Back around 2012, a friend of mine sent me a press release about how Disney was making a new princess show about a little girl from a poor village who becomes a princess overnight when her mother marries the king. The endearing image of the little girl on the press release instantly caught my attention with her unique reddish-brown curls, playful expression, and gorgeous lavender dress that was dripping with pearl accents. Something about this description and image got me so excited for the series that I got to work right away on making a grown-up sized cosplay of Sofia's elegant gown. The series premiered on Disney Junior with a TV special called Once Upon a Princess in which Sofia received her legendary Amulet of Avalor and sang about her insecurities for her future life as a princess heroine in the song "Not Ready To Be a Princess." I loved her instantly. Over the next six years, she took me on a four season-long journey filled with Disney Princesses, fairies, mermaid…

The internet has been buzzing about Kingdom Hearts III finally getting a release date after fifteen long years of anticipation. Unless it gets delayed again, we will be able to catch up with Sora, Donald, and Goofy as they travel through the realms of various Disney movies on January 29th, 2019. There have been a couple of trailers dropped over the last few days revealing footage from Frozen, Tangled, Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Hercules, and Pirates of the Caribbean. For me, the biggest announcement came from the latter half of last night's trailer in which Larxene of Organization XIII remarked that Elsa might be one of the new seven pure hearts that they needed for their latest quest. Anyone who has played the first game knows that this is a reference to the Princesses of Heart, a select group of Disney Princesses who had their chance to become video game royalty when they got captured by Maleficent in an attempt to use their pure hearts to open the Door to Darkness. My biggest pe…

We all had lots of fun playing with princess dolls as kids and brushing their hair until it became ratty and tangled. For those of us who are older, there has is the option of purchasing pricier collectible dolls that are made with finer details in their hair and clothes and come with their own stands for display purposes. While princesses have never exactly been lacking in options for collectible dolls, the Disney Princess Designer Collection that was revealed at the D23 Expo in 2011 was the start of something special. Each princess had her own designer dress that looked like it came straight off a modern-day runway. The collection was released alongside lithographs, cards, mugs, and other paraphernalia featuring beautiful matching artwork. The dolls themselves weren't sculpted from your typical Barbie mold. They had fully articulated wrist and elbow joints, salon quality hair that stayed perfectly in place, bigger painted eyes, and long realistic eyelashes that you could actuall…

In 2008, the Philippines released a mermaid princess telenovela that was based on a popular graphic novel by Mars Ravelo in 1952. Dyesebel is loosely based on the story of "The Little Mermaid" with a few distinct differences. It was Dyesebel's mother, Queen Lucia, who first fell in love with a human and left the underwater world of Sirenea to be with him, sacrificing her memories of her life as a mermaid in the process. Dyesebel was born on land, but because of her tail, her mother returned her to the sea, entrusting her to her best friend, Banak, to raise her. Her human father, Tino, was murdered by humans who believed that mermaids were bad luck. Unaware of the circumstances of her birth, Dyesebel grew up curious about the human world until one day, she fell in love with a human and was doomed to follow in her mother's footsteps. The 2008 adaptation of Dyesebel is performed in the native Filipino language, Tagalog, but I was able to watch it with English subtitles …

If you're one of the five people on Earth who still hasn't seen the new Wreck-It Ralph 2 trailer that dropped this morning, I'm here to break it down for you. The trailer featured roughly the first half of a scene in which all of the living voice actresses for the Disney Princesses reprised their roles as Vanellope snuck into their secret internet headquarters that was presented at the D23 Expo last year. A screenshot released last week previewed the scene with Ariel missing, but now we see that she was just off-screen combing her hair with her favorite dinglehopper in a blinged out version of pink tea dress along with lots more animation of other the princesses in their oddly disproportionate new CGI style animation. Let's take a look.

For starters, it's a bit odd how Ariel and Cinderella have swapped the levels of bling on their ballgowns. In the 1950 animated movie, Cinderella's dress appeared to have made from a lightweight silvery-white fabric emblazoned w…

The internet went a little crazy when Entertainment Weekly released Disney's first promo photos of the fully costumed actors from their upcoming Aladdin remake last week. Many were disappointed with what they saw, which unfortunately tends to be the case for live-action remakes. For instance, Aladdin's signature purple vest was changed to red, making it closer to the Broadway version of the show. He was also given a relatively nice shirt underneath, which is more than a little confusing for those of us who remember how poor he was in the original film. Will Smith as the Genie looked a little too much like a normal human instead of a mystical blue entity, but apparently that's still coming. Princess fans were most excited to see previews of Jasmine's wardrobe. In terms of quantity, the internet did not disappoint. We now have images of three of Jasmine's looks that will be featured in the movie as well as a peek at her new handmaiden.

In my "Little Mermaid" origins post, I mentioned that there were three live-action movies in the works based on the beloved Hans Christian Andersen tale. Since then, a few announcements have been made about all three of these movies. One of them has a theatrical release date, and it's sooner than you might think. The circus-themed indie movie that's had a trailer out for several years now is coming to select AMC theaters on August 17th. That's in two months! I wish I could be more excited about it, but the plot looks a lot closer to the 2006 tongue-in-cheek teen mermaid movie Aquamarine than the fairy tale that it's named after. The trailer focuses on how a little girl's belief in mermaids has the potential to save the aquatic heroine who is held captive in a tank at a carnival. I've been feeling indifferent about this adaptation ever since the first trailer was released, but it's nice to know that I will have the option to see it on the big scree…

Sofia the First, everyone's favorite princess-in-training, has met every official Disney Princess that existed when her show began with the sole exception of Pocahontas. The power of her purple amulet granted her the ability to summon famous princesses whenever she was in trouble. Technically, she never met Anna either, but the episode "Olaf and the Tale of Miss Nettle" implied that she was supposed to meet her but got Olaf instead because her amulet was on the fritz. About a year ago, her amulet turned pink and granted her new powers. It now sends her to help princesses, meaning that the chances of her meeting Pocahontas at this point are virtually nonexistent. Why did they acknowledge every other princess movie except this one? Actually, they did acknowledge the 1995 animated classic in an episode of Sofia, but it was very subtle.

In the 2015 episode of Sofia the First, "The Secret Library," Sofia discovers a hidden passageway beneath her castle where a boat …